A Separation is a sophisticated, superbly acted and wholly gripping portrait
of modern Iran.

Winner of numerous awards at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation is a sophisticated, superbly acted and wholly gripping portrait of modern Iran. It begins with a married middle-class couple - Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Ma’adi) — pleading with a judge to be divorced: she wants to leave the country with their daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), while her husband wishes to stay in order to look after his father who has Alzheimer’s.

They fail, and decide to separate, with Simin moving out.

Nader hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat) to look after his father, but she has problems too, among them a hot-headed husband (Shahab Hossein) who doesn’t approve her of working, and her own religious qualms that lead her to call an Islamic helpline to find out whether she’s permitted to pull down and clean the sodden trousers of the stricken father. Then, one disastrous day, she and Nader have an altercation; there is jostling, a fall, and a miscarriage. Is Nader at fault? If so, to what lengths will he go in order to conceal his crime.

A Separation twists and turns, layering on crucial details and moral quandaries in each scene, never for a moment allowing us the luxury of identifying too easily with any single character. The faultlines of class, gender and religion are deftly threaded into each dramatic situation.